Ted and Harvard, 1962

In 1962, any suggestion that Edward Moore Kennedy might someday be rightly eulogized as a great senator—one of the greatest ever, the lion of the Senate, a wise and skilled legislator, an unbending paladin of American liberalism at its practical best, a fitting occupant of the seat of Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner—would have been greeted with a coffee-spraying horse laugh, especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The youngest and reputedly stupidest of Joseph P. Kennedy’s nine children had finally graduated from Harvard in 1956, two years after the rest of his entering class. (He had to take a leave after getting caught having a friend take an exam for him.) Now, just six years out of college, he was running for senator—for his brother’s vacated seat, which the family had arranged to be kept warm by a temporary appointee, an old Harvard roommate of J.F.K.’s.

There’s a legend that Harvard and the Kennedys were in love with each other, but at Teddy’s alma mater the reactions to his presumption ranged from outrage and contempt to disrepect and exasperation. The Harvard-Radcliffe Young Democratic Club endorsed his opponent in the primary and, after he won, refused to endorse him in the general. Those few students who favored his candidacy did so mainly for self-consciously “hardnosed” reasons: he was J.F.K.’s brother, he would be a reliable supporter of the Administration, he would be a sure winner in November. Ted’s faculty supporters, a relative handful, had various motives, but one of them, surely, a prudent desire to avoid irritating the President and Harvard colleagues in the White House, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (lately professor of history), and McGeorge Bundy (lately dean of the faculty of arts and sciences).

Some Harvard types opposed Teddy because he wasn’t left-wing enough to suit them, but more, including a lot of big J.F.K. fans, turned up their noses at the kid brother simply because he had no experience (unless you count a short spell as one of several assistant district attorneys in Suffolk County), no ideas (unless “He Can Do More For Massachusetts” counts as an idea), and no qualifications, apart from being a member of a famous and powerful political family. It was more than a little silly that the dynastic angle was held so strongly against him, given that everyone else in the race was a dynast, too.

I was a sophomore at the time and a denizen of the Crimson, the undergraduate daily. My main contribution to our campaign coverage was a dull, rather credulous piece about the undergraduate days of Teddy’s Republican opponent, the somewhat dreamy, somewhat liberal George Cabot Lodge II, class of ’50. (The third-party “peace” candidate, H. Stuart Hughes, was not a Harvard grad. His only connection to Harvard was that he was a tenured professor of European history.) I wasn’t quite as hostile to Teddy as most of my fellow “Crimeds,” but I had no great objections to our editorial endorsing Hughes. This was years before Vietnam revolutionized student politics; the Crimson’s editorialists modelled themselves on the Economist, not the East Village Other. The preferred tone was lofty, languid, and condescending. A few excerpts:

The weary, shopworn mechanisms of Massachusetts politics have finally broken down this year. Out of the process of nominating and selecting candidates for the U.S. Senate have come Edward M. Kennedy and George Cabot Lodge, two men of no particular qualification for any political position.

***

Kennedy, who will almost certainly win this election, is a political curiosity by any standards… His immaturity, inexperience, disinclination to debate with his opponents or to run on any platform save his brother’s are by now obvious facts.

***

Kennedy is no doubt preposterous, and a symptom of political sickness, but the real sickness is in the system that produced both candidates, and has insisted that the voters choose between them.

***

Hughes, certainly, is not the best possible Independent candidate. The CRIMSON agrees with little of his platform. He has not put forward his ideas with extraordinary intelligence or clarity, and although he has never equalled his opponents banality, he has failed to raise the level of the campaign as he hoped to.

Yet for all that, he speaks for a section of American political life that needs enlarging. Nothing so substantial as this can be said of Kennedy or Lodge. Voting for, and hence electing, either of them will make not the smallest difference to the country. A large vote for Hughes might. To vote for Hughes is to protest a decrepit, uncaring political system in Massachusetts and to encourage the Kennedy Administration to enact more liberal legislation. In a Senate race of such breathtaking mediocrity, it seems the only reasonable vote.

The only person on the Crimson who was really enthusiastic about Teddy Kennedy was our star shutterbug, Donal Holway, and he was on the Kennedy organization’s payroll—he had a term-time job as the official campaign photographer.

Late one night, a little before the election, a bunch of us were sitting around the newsroom in the Crimson building talking, as was our wont. When the conversation turned to politics, the two or three Radcliffe girls (as the female counterparts of Harvard boys were then called) present were especially dismissive of Teddy.

The door opened, and in from the street came Don Holway. A few steps after him, smiling and striding and carrying Don’s canvas bags of cameras and lenses, there was Ted Kennedy, bigger than life. He was impossibly handsome. He dumped Don’s bags in the darkroom, stopped for a few words of friendly chat, made eye contact with everyone, and was gone.

We were junior sophisticates, scornful of “mediocrity” and the rest, but we were dazzled. The “girls,” for their part, literally swooned. The tingle of excitement was something they—we—never forgot.

That Crimson editorial again:

Neither candidate stands for anything—a set of convictions, a record in office, or even a definite program. They have no opinions, only prejudices they do not argue, only assert. In short, they are conventional senatorial candidates, though a little worse than most. Neither believes in anything, neither has any force or imagination, and it seems entirely safe to say that neither would greatly dignify the Senate.

That was unfair to George Lodge, who joined the Harvard Business School faculty a few months after the election, had what appears to have been a distinguished career teaching and writing about international economic development, especially in Latin America, and is now a professor emeritus.

About Teddy it was less unfair—and also completely wrong. The road was long and bumpy, the setbacks spectacular and often self-inflicted. For the final twenty-five years of his nearly half-century-long senatorial career, Edward Kennedy was a statesman of extraordinary conviction, force, and imagination. It is entirely safe to say that he greatly dignified the Senate. And the nation.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.